Railroad companies (UP, SP etc.) were heavily subsidized in the 19th century by federal land grants and loans.
Then there's the thousands of Chinese, Italians, Irish etc. immigrants who died during railroad construction because of unregulated working conditions.
i.e. these were plutocratic, not libertarian political conditions.
>BTW, in regard to ADHD, children with ADHD
>frequently show marked improvement (better)
>concentration, better haved) when given Ritalin,
>which in other children acts as a stimulant.
>There is very good evidence that there is a
>neological disorder involved, not just "spoilt brats".
I think the inference you are making is that if a
behavioral condition responds to a drug,
the condition must be congenital. I believe that
this a false, though common conclusion. The obvious
parallel is treating an anthrax infection with antibiotics. You
aren't born with the anthrax infection, yet
it is correctable with a drug.
A behavioral example would be "failure to thrive",
where studies have shown that this dramatic
physical condition (which seems to me to
be depression in the very young) is caused by environmental factors.
I guess what I'm saying, is that environmental conditions
can change your brain chemistry (just as can
drugs like ritalin).
BTW, I think everyone is clear that there is huge
difference b/n full blown autism and the behavior
described in the Wired article. Autism shows
up very early in life, it is very easy to
diagnose, even by a layperson, and it has
been shown clearly to be not caused by
upbringing.
To me it is obvious that the huge growth in
ADD/ADHD is because of changes in children's
environments (too much tv, too many hyperactive
tv shows, not enough play
outdoors, not enough time with parents etc.), but that's just my opinion.
Yeah, I concur with Dom. I used to work on a product (EndNote) that had to read Word Doc's, and it was by far the most complicated format I have ever seen. And if the doc was fast-saved? Forget about it! (Of course, we were modifying the file, which is harder).
i.e. they use Java/JSP for login/subscription control). They also use Oracle for "more complex database management needs". Oh, also, they use R:Base (!!! - hey that was old when I got my first job in the late 80's).
Sounds like the typical real-world reality of a production environment:^) I like Grant's spin
on using Java/JSP:
"Grant chose to introduce some diversity into Salon's infrastructure"
Finally, a rational discussion of the merits of XML. Hate to use the buzzward, but it's all about
repurposing baby! XML facilitates creating
docs that you can then convert to a
variety of output formats.
This is pretty much 50% of my job, so that's why I think it's so cool. And after years
of poring over binary dumps of other people's
data (well, and my data too), It's very
nice to use a human, self-documenting format.
I think a lot of the XML posts you
see are from people who don't do this sort of stuff for a living.
XSL is also cool, once you climb the steep
learning curve and
bend your mind around it's declarative style.
As for native xml db's - that is probably
mostly hype.
Yeah, sure, the mouse is faster than the keyboard; so the fact that I use Alt-Tab to switch tasks in Windows, I quickly learn the compile/break keyboard equivalents every time I use a new IDE, etc. is because I'm delusional?
Presumably, the people in that study were new to
the tasks; it always takes some thinking time
to use keyboard equivalents at first, before your fingers have remembered them. Then, after a while,
they are much, much quicker.
The Rise of ``Worse is Better'' is
a interesting paper! the analysis "PC loser-ing problem" is right on the mark.
When I first started unix programming, one of the
programs I had to maintain had intermittent and seemly random read failures. After much debugging, it turned out that the read call was occasionally failing with errno == EINTR because it was getting interrupted by an ALRM or something. The solution was trivial - I put in a retry if read failed with EINTR.
EINTR is very counter-intuitive and
my mistake was quite understandble.
I've encountered bunch of other things like that in unix; e.g. that malloc isn't guaranteed to be reentrant.
But, I love unix. Similarly, lisp is cool (I had a lot of fun with the little lisper) but I never have and never will be paid to use it and I
don't think I'd really like to do any substantial work with it (though knowing it probably helped me learn perl more quickly).
Yes! The 9/11 hijackings/flying bombs were a one-off event; if it happens again, the people on board will just risk their lives and mob the hijakers (this apparently already happened on the fourth flight on 9/11).
Re:what's the difference?
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
(I'm a newbie, so please forgive any ugly formatting here)
The best advice I ever got from a boss was to use an editor called BRIEF back when I was DOS programmer.
BRIEF is long dead, but emacs is almost as good;^)
emacs has tons of features that help you when you are programming; examples:
narrow down to a subroutine:
M-C-h (mark subroutine)
C-X n n (narrow edit view to selected region)
now you can search and replace inside just
this subroutine (e.g. if you want to change
a variable name).
C-X n w (view whole document)
to go back.
support for a tag stack:
M-* (go to routine under cursor)
now you can fool around, move to other files, edit code etc., and then type:
M-. (pop tag stack)
when you want to go back where you started.
You can run a shell in a subwindow, and use all your emacs editing keys in there (and copy and paste back to other emacs windows). You can switch behind all your windows using only keystrokes.
emacs works just as well in text mode as in an X-Window.
list goes on and on and on...
Yeah, I use vi some too, but, using SAT notation:
vi:assembly::emacs:high level language
(maybe that's a little too strong)
Slashdot Mirror
Railroad companies (UP, SP etc.) were heavily subsidized in the 19th century by federal land grants and loans.
Then there's the thousands of Chinese, Italians, Irish etc. immigrants who died during railroad construction because of unregulated working conditions.
i.e. these were plutocratic, not libertarian political conditions.
-Alfred North Whitehead
Using short keyboard sequences gives you lots of operations that can easily become unconscious.
Their MySQL book is even worse than the Postgres book (which is quite bad).
I personally have found "PostgreSQL Essential Reference" by Barry Stinson to be the most useful Postgres book.
>frequently show marked improvement (better)
>concentration, better haved) when given Ritalin,
>which in other children acts as a stimulant.
>There is very good evidence that there is a
>neological disorder involved, not just "spoilt brats".
I think the inference you are making is that if a behavioral condition responds to a drug, the condition must be congenital. I believe that this a false, though common conclusion. The obvious parallel is treating an anthrax infection with antibiotics. You aren't born with the anthrax infection, yet it is correctable with a drug. A behavioral example would be "failure to thrive", where studies have shown that this dramatic physical condition (which seems to me to be depression in the very young) is caused by environmental factors. I guess what I'm saying, is that environmental conditions can change your brain chemistry (just as can drugs like ritalin).
BTW, I think everyone is clear that there is huge difference b/n full blown autism and the behavior described in the Wired article. Autism shows up very early in life, it is very easy to diagnose, even by a layperson, and it has been shown clearly to be not caused by upbringing.
To me it is obvious that the huge growth in ADD/ADHD is because of changes in children's environments (too much tv, too many hyperactive tv shows, not enough play outdoors, not enough time with parents etc.), but that's just my opinion.
Yeah, I concur with Dom. I used to work on a product (EndNote) that had to read Word Doc's, and it was by far the most complicated format I have ever seen. And if the doc was fast-saved? Forget about it! (Of course, we were modifying the file, which is harder).
i.e. they use Java/JSP for login/subscription control). They also use Oracle for "more complex database management needs". Oh, also, they use R:Base (!!! - hey that was old when I got my first job in the late 80's).
Sounds like the typical real-world reality of a production environment:^) I like Grant's spin on using Java/JSP:
"Grant chose to introduce some diversity into Salon's infrastructure"
XSL is also cool, once you climb the steep learning curve and bend your mind around it's declarative style.
As for native xml db's - that is probably mostly hype.
Presumably, the people in that study were new to the tasks; it always takes some thinking time to use keyboard equivalents at first, before your fingers have remembered them. Then, after a while, they are much, much quicker.
When I first started unix programming, one of the programs I had to maintain had intermittent and seemly random read failures. After much debugging, it turned out that the read call was occasionally failing with errno == EINTR because it was getting interrupted by an ALRM or something. The solution was trivial - I put in a retry if read failed with EINTR.
EINTR is very counter-intuitive and my mistake was quite understandble. I've encountered bunch of other things like that in unix; e.g. that malloc isn't guaranteed to be reentrant.
But, I love unix. Similarly, lisp is cool (I had a lot of fun with the little lisper) but I never have and never will be paid to use it and I don't think I'd really like to do any substantial work with it (though knowing it probably helped me learn perl more quickly).
Yes! The 9/11 hijackings/flying bombs were a one-off event; if it happens again, the people on board will just risk their lives and mob the hijakers (this apparently already happened on the fourth flight on 9/11).
(I'm a newbie, so please forgive any ugly formatting here) The best advice I ever got from a boss was to use an editor called BRIEF back when I was DOS programmer. BRIEF is long dead, but emacs is almost as good ;^)
emacs has tons of features that help you when you are programming; examples:
narrow down to a subroutine:
M-C-h (mark subroutine)
C-X n n (narrow edit view to selected region)
now you can search and replace inside just
this subroutine (e.g. if you want to change
a variable name).
C-X n w (view whole document)
to go back.
support for a tag stack:
M-* (go to routine under cursor)
now you can fool around, move to other files, edit code etc., and then type:
M-. (pop tag stack)
when you want to go back where you started.
You can run a shell in a subwindow, and use all your emacs editing keys in there (and copy and paste back to other emacs windows). You can switch behind all your windows using only keystrokes.
emacs works just as well in text mode as in an X-Window.
list goes on and on and on...
Yeah, I use vi some too, but, using SAT notation:
vi:assembly::emacs:high level language
(maybe that's a little too strong)